Monday, 29 November 2010

Wide Screen Journal on Film Production Studies

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife. This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides. [Erik Knudsen]

We often hear that the power of films lays in their emotional impact. In recent years, some corners of film studies have been preoccupied with the investigation of the senses and the body, which could be related to the view of films in terms of emotions and affect. Much of the filmmaking process rests on creating and communicating this emotional power of the films. Instead of thinking, like Powdermaker did, that the film workers are collectively involved in story-telling, or like Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, that they are preoccupied with the generation of a particular style of filmmaking, we would like to argue that films are collectively involved in generating, assembling and crafting the emotion of the film. [Graham Roberts and Dorota Ostrowska]

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Founded in 2008, FSFFis lovingly tended (in a personal capacity) by Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She always wanted to be a Borgesian librarianwhen she grew up.